Deactivating Locations in Zelph

When managing multiple warehouses or fulfillment locations in Shopify, there may be times when you need to deactivate a location and migrate its inventory to another.

Because of how Shopify webhooks work, it’s critical that you always deactivate locations through Zelph and not directly in Shopify. This ensures your inventory levels remain accurate across all connected stores.

Why Deactivate Through Zelph?

Shopify does not provide enough detail in its /locations/update or /locations/deactivate webhooks for us to know where inventory has been migrated. If you deactivate directly in Shopify:

• We will continue to include inventory levels from deactivated locations.
• Shopify will not tell us which destination location the inventory was migrated to.
• This causes mismatches and can break your downstream inventory syncing.

By using Zelph’s Deactivate Location workflow, we can deterministically:

• Track the deactivated location ID.
• Know the destination location ID you select.
• Migrate all inventory levels safely to the new location.
• Cascade the change across your secondary stores if you have location mapping set up.

How to Deactivate a Location in Zelph

1. Go to Locations in your Zelph tenant panel.

   Find the location you want to deactivate and click Deactivate.

   In the popup, you will be asked to select a destination location.

   • This is where all inventory will be migrated.

   • Example: Deactivate Paris Warehouse → Migrate to Amsterdam Warehouse.

     
     
2. Click Submit to confirm the action.

Once confirmed:

• The location is deactivated.
• All inventory levels are migrated to the selected destination.
• If you have multiple stores connected, the migration will cascade across all of them automatically.

What If You Deactivate in Shopify?

If you deactivate a location directly in the Shopify admin:

• Zelph will receive a webhook but won’t know where the inventory went.
• We will soft-delete the inventory levels we still had linked to that location.
• Shopify will eventually send new product inventory levels, which we will sync.
• However, the granular inventory migration between locations will be lost.

👉 Moral of the story: Always deactivate through Zelph to prevent data mismatches.

Best Practices

• Always use Zelph → Locations → Deactivate.
• Train your staff not to deactivate locations in Shopify directly.
• If you have multiple stores, ensure location mapping is set up before deactivating.
• During onboarding, make sure your team is aware of this workflow.

✅ Following this process ensures that your inventory stays accurate across all your connected stores and channels.